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[Audio] Mike talks about Linkin Park's new album 'Living Things'

In an interview with KROQ’s Kevin & Bean, Mike Shinoda unveiled details on Linkin Park’s upcoming album Living Things as well and world premiered the first single titled “Burn It Down”. Read and listen below.

The street date for the band’s fifth studio album is scheduled for June 26.

After listening to the new single, Kevin asked what he has against Phoenix, the band’s bassist, because the bass line is played on a synth. To which Mike responded, “With a lot of things on this record, we just got more comfortable, more so than in the last few years, dipping back into some of the stuff that we used to do in the earlier days of our career.”

“I think there’s a lot of variety on the record. The songs on Living Things tend to be a bit shorter, kinda those firecracker, compact songs that people kind of imagine when they think of the band.”

When asked who the single “Burn It Down” was about, Shinoda directed it back at the band saying “Kinda like what we do in pop culture, we build somebody up to be the next great thing then we like to destroy them at the end of the day. And, we’ve lived through that so I think there’s a lot of personal energy that went into the connection of that story.”

When asked about the band mates’ willingness to tour, Shinoda used the band’s acceptance of social media as an analogy, “Some of the guys in the band have no interest in doing stuff online, with Twitter, with Facebook… We’re the biggest band on Facebook, two or three of our guys never post.” He continued, “It’s not a good fit for them. Even when they do go on and post, it tends to be stuff that like.. a lot of the fans just go ‘I don’t have any idea what they’re talking about.’ It’s like why make that guy do it”
Mike took the opportunity to break the news that the band would be touring with Incubus on the upcoming Honda Civic Tour, kicking off August 11th with tickets going on sale April 27th. “If you pre-order our album on linkinpark.com you get access to get your tickets early on April 25th.”

“We kept running into them [Incubus] on the road and and I started hanging out with Mike Einziger, and he’s just like the nicest guy ever… and it was so organic the way the concert came about.”